Tracks 6 and 7 from P. Diddy & The Bad Boy Family's The Saga Continues... (2001)

Track 8 from P. Diddy & Bad Boy Records Presents... We Invented The Remix (2002)

Track 16 from Diddy's MMM (2015)

Tracks 17 and 18 from Diddy's The Love Album: Off The Grid (2023)

We think of Dr. Dre, Kanye West, and Diddy in very different ways, particularly today, but I look at them as all the same archetype: producer/rappers who each had a small army of other producers and rappers helping them make beats and verses for most of their careers, eventually building empires, shaping hip-hop history over multiple eras, and becoming permanently famous billionaires. They're leaders, they're visionaries, to some extent they're probably also glory-grabbing thieves. 

Diddy's legacy is more in the albums he crafted behind the scenes like Ready To Die or My Life -- you wouldn't necessarily put any of his solo albums on the level of The Chronic or The College Dropout. But No Way Out went 7 times platinum and completely changed the scale and nature of hip-hop stardom. His peak was reminiscent of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice era pop rappers in how massive but fleeting it was, and how much it was centered on his videos, his dancing, his shamelessly obvious samples. But Puff kept adapting, kept shifting, remaining the top mogul in rap even as he quickly slipped out of the top rapper spot. 

Some of Diddy's most popular album tracks like "Senorita" are just flat out bad songs, so I went more for quality tracks, cool moments he created, often by utilizing other artists in brilliant ways. Probably the best Biggie/Jay-Z collaboration, awesome show-stealing guest spots from Twista and 8Ball & MJG when they were still regional stars on the come up, a posse cut with Nas and Beanie Sigel before the Nas/Jay beef, etc. I also wanted to spotlight the original album track version of "I Need A Girl" because it's such a totally different track from the 2 remixes that were both hits. I also wanted to grab something from the Bad Boys II soundtrack that Diddy exec produced because that was really some great brand synergy and more big movies probably should've had Diddy put together their soundtrack albums. 

Press Play was the beginning of Diddy's modern era of kind of moving past NYC hip hop and into making big opulent R&B/pop records, although that album does have "The Future," a hilarious but kind of awesome track of Diddy spitting rhymes written by Pharoahe Monch over a Havoc beat. That era peaked with Last Train To Paris, for my money one of the best albums of the 2010s. One of the most exciting things about listening to The Love Album for the first time last week was hearing Dirty Money reunite on a track, what Diddy, Dawn Richard and Kalenna did together was really special. And Diddy's full-on dance album with Guy Gerber and his mixtape MMM were pretty good, underrated projects too. King Los, one of the most talented rappers to ever come out of Baltimore, was signed to Bad Boy for two stints without ever dropping an album, so it was cool to at least get a Diddy project with multiple Los features.